"It costs $93,064 to attend Brown University. the annual budget deficit is $46 million. I wanted to know where the hell all the money was going."Earlier this month, Brown University sophomore Alex Shieh lit the internet on fire after asking the school's small army of non-instructional staff to justify their jobs, receiving coverage from Newsweek and
Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. Today in Pirate Wires, he writes about the inspiration behind his project — and its aftermath.
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Around 2 a.m. on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday, I launched a public database mapping all 3,805 non-faculty employees of Brown University and sent each one a simple email: What do you do all day?
Ostensibly, it was a journalistic inquiry. The site, which I named
Bloat@Brown, was somewhere between FaceMash (Mark Zuckerberg's college project that scraped student ID photos and let users rank who was hotter) and DOGE. But instead of using Zuckerberg's ELO-style rankings — a numerical method originally developed for ranking chess players — my site, Bloat@Brown, used retrieval-augmented generation and a custom GPT-4o pipeline to rank administrators by their operational importance.
Comment: Anyone surprised this wast of oxygen was also mixed up in the Oct. 7 rape lies?